Comrade Cockroach and Doctor Mercury’s ongoing love story, Hand In Unlovable Hand saw a dramatic change in art-style with Tuesday’s installment. One half me trying to emulate old 70’s Métal Hurlant comics and another half me finally getting the hang of this whole watercolor business, Tuesday’s and Thursday’s pages are the where this strange, blood-soaked love story finally began to feel right.

Next week, things are really going to go off the rails. More off the rails than Comrade Cockroach dying? Yes. Absolutely.

Monday saw the release of episode 170 of The Voice of Free Planet X, the first part of my weird western”Big Damn Heroes,” Thief of My Heart. I’m doing something a little different with BDH, using the cold opens to provide a little more insight into individual characters without breaking up the narrative. So two very important characters, Queen, the smooth-talking gambler and Daji, the psychic who can see the future, got quite a bit of storytime. As they should, because they are fantastic.

Now, you of course are free to imagine whoever you want in roles of Queen and Daji when you listen to Thief of My Heart, but I had pictured Janelle Monae as Queen and Fan Bingbing as Daji when I was writing it. Take that how you will.

Jared Axelrod is an author, an illustrator, and a world changer. Through out her eventful life she has also been a circus performer, a puppeteer, a graphic designer, a sculptor, a costume designer, a podcaster and quite a few other things that she’s lost track of but will no doubt remember when the situation calls for it. But that “author’ business, that seems to be one she keeps coming back to.